


Smaller Than Himself

by magikfanfic



Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016)
Genre: Baby guardians, Backstory, First Meetings, M/M, Pre-Rogue One
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-24
Updated: 2017-04-24
Packaged: 2018-10-23 12:46:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,103
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10719615
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/magikfanfic/pseuds/magikfanfic
Summary: Baze Malbus is little more than one giant bruise when he is brought to the temple. A giant bruise and a mess of tangled, dirty hair. He has five broken ribs, a black eye, a split lip, and a twisted ankle that he limps on, hissing pain with every step but refusing to lie down, refusing to take it easy.2017 Spiritassassin weekPrompt 1: First Impressions





	Smaller Than Himself

**Author's Note:**

> So I might have mistakenly remembered the first prompt as "first meeting" when I started this ficlet. So my fault. But I still think it works. Also this one is very, "Just let Sara have fun with words." There are hints of Very Bad Things that have happened to Baze but none of them are gone into in depth, which is why I didn't tag for anything but maybe just be aware.

Baze Malbus is little more than one giant bruise when he is brought to the temple. A giant bruise and a mess of tangled, dirty hair. He has five broken ribs, a black eye, a split lip, and a twisted ankle that he limps on, hissing pain with every step but refusing to lie down, refusing to take it easy. He doesn't want to be coddled, he insists. He is not an invalid, not a child. He is just hurt. It is evident in the way he says it, quick, slapdash with no modicum of shame at all, that not only has he been hurt before, but that he is used to it, so used to it that he doesn't understand why the masters make tutting noises, why the healers frown and turn their heads when they find the seemingly never-ending collection of scars across his broad body. He just scowls at them, obviously annoyed by how much they care, unused to the that feeling, and repeats that he is not a child.

He is fourteen, still a child despite his size and his declaration, despite the bright flares of his eyes that show, in all the worst ways, that he knows things that children should not know, but this type of knowledge is common on Jedha. Jedhan has many words for child, many words for adult and all the layers in-between. They follow a range of innocence, a marking of how much one has seen and endured and felt. No one knows where to put Baze on the scale yet, and all he does is snarl, all bite, all teeth like something backed into a corner over and over again, like something that has never known a kind touch once in its life. He is so large for fourteen. He is so tall, and he is so broad. There are trees in the temple garden smaller and frailer than this boy who claims he is not a boy, never has been a boy, doesn’t even know what that is because he is just him. He is just him. And that is what the masters go with. This is Baze, they say and little else because everything that he is screams at the world around him in his clenched fists and his clenched face and the way he hisses words through his teeth as though they will be stolen from him otherwise.

He is a not a candle flickering low in the wind. He is not fragile. He is a blaster bolt in the night lighting up the entire city with its brilliance born of pain and heartbreak and anger. 

The masters know that they are going to have their hands full with him. It will go one way or the other. They will heal him, tame him, uncurl his fists, unbreak his heart, lighten his soul. Or they will heal him and watch him slip back into the night to blaze the world around him with the fire spilling out of his chest, unfurling from his eyes, a streak of ruin, to burn himself out. They have seen it before, but there is no way of knowing which way the scales will tip. All is as the Force wills it, after all. All is as the Force wills it. It becomes a hard statement when they watch the burning children, the ghost fire children, limp into their circle and then rocket back out to meet what is likely to be an untimely end.

All is as the Force wills it sometimes becomes a hollow, sad mantra, a way of dealing with the fact that sometimes there is nothing that can be done, nothing that can be changed, sometimes even the softest hand, even the most well meaning attempt can fail if the person on the other side doesn’t want to accept it, doesn’t want to try. You cannot force someone to be saved.

All is as the Force wills it, they tell him, and Baze, bright eyes, sad heart, burning, a brush fire, a high pitched scream caught in the wind and echoing in the valleys, looks at them as though he doesn’t understand any of the words they are saying, as though he doesn’t know the Force when he drips with it, as though he doesn’t understand the concept of will as though he lives from one moment to the next without considering how, without making conscious choices, bouncing off the walls when he hits them to change direction.

It is a hinge point. It is a crux. It is a marking.

Something may rise or fail on this point. 

When he speaks, he speaks in rumbles, the shake of the ground, the way that sounds reflect off the walls of the kyber caves and grow and swell until they are the only things that can be heard. Baze sounds like that. Sounds like someone meant for talking. Sounds like someone meant for prayers and holy scripture. He sounds like a Guardian. 

Or a gun. Or ruin. It is so hard to tell, and there are so many ways in which the world can turn that they will never know until they know, until it is too late for it to be anything else no matter how hard they may wish for another outcome.

“What’s the Force?” he asks. For a moment there is a lull. For a moment there is a gleam. It is hope and sparkly bright and altogether everywhere like kyber dust in the air of the cutting room, everything illuminated. Until it dims. “And if it wills everything, why does it will the bad things as well?”

The masters dare not ask for definitions. They have them in droves, in the set of his eyes, in the scars across his body, in the three breaks the healers found that never set right but cause him no pain so they did not want to consider breaking them again, in the way that he holds himself smaller than himself and away, in his hair which looks like no one has ever combed it. In the way that he looks like no one has ever cared for him, ever loved him. Not once.

He is one of the cases that make even the most devoted of the masters wonder why the Force would will things like this even though they know better. They know better. But it still hurts, still rolls doubt over them like a wave of cold water crashing, sucking at their feet; undertow those from worlds with oceans explain when they sit around together and talk about the day. 

Baze Malbus is an undertow. Strong, deceptive, dangerous, lurking and unseen until it is too late, until you have been pulled under. 

They begin to believe that he will flee, fly again on the winds, as soon as he can. This is no Jedha bird rising from the ashes. This is no resurrection. This is just another lost cause child who will burn himself out. They begin to say farewell prayers in the night. They begin to make a bundle that maybe they can persuade him into taking with him, one that might keep him alive a little bit longer.

He is fourteen, but he is much older. 

Chirrut Imwe is thirteen, but he is much younger. 

Born of the temple, raised in the temple, soft in the Force, which is not the same thing as weak. Chirrut is not weak, never has been, scraped in the temple gardens when he was six years old and scrawny and small for his age, fought with the older, bigger children to prove that he could match them, that he could best them, that he was not to be looked over, passed over. Soft in the Force, a phrase used for one who sits in it, surrounded by it, a rock in a stream, hands in the water, feeling everything, disturbing nothing. Chirrut is Force inundated. It flows in him, around him, through him. 

Soft in the Force people cannot be Jedi, cannot bend the universe’s energy to their will because they are more cognizant of it, of the way it works, flows. They understand where it needs to be, what it needs to do. They let it be what it is instead of what they want it to be.

Baze Malbus, the masters know, could have been Jedi, could have been Sith. Everything about him screams wanting, a need to make things different by any means possible, and his energy is strong enough it crackles into the air around him. He makes everything too bright or too dark or too loud. Static. Thunder. Lights behind eyelids. Earthquakes. 

Their meeting is inevitable. Their meeting is the crash of a drum in the middle of silent meditation. Their meeting is a mountain falling down, a city burning, a sea pitching out of its bed.

Their meeting is two boys in the middle of a garden. 

There are flowers on the tree in the center. Baze stands under it and stares up as though he has never seen flowers before, and his eyes are wide with something like awe, something gentler than everything else he has ever been before. It is a rare moment. It is a young moment on the face of someone who has obviously not had many of those. He stands, dirty face tipped up, hair a tangled mess on his shoulders, mouth open and stares as though trying to memorize every petal, every leaf, as though trying to absorb it all inside of himself so that he never loses it because he knows that it too will soon disappear as everything lovely disappears, sucked away into the giant hole of wanting that is the world.

Soft soft soft. He is soft in this moment. He is rounded edges. He is a dirty giant with flower petals in his hair, and joy in his eyes. He is all those layers peeled down to the heart of him, to the quick, to something that he has never been before. And this is the Baze Malbus that Chirrut sees. This is the moment that burns itself into his mind, that never fades, that lingers on the tip of his tongue for years to come like a word that can never be fully remembered, like something that can never be spoken. 

Chirrut is thirteen and very young, but he loves this boy under the tree in a way that he doesn’t understand. It hits him like a foot to the chest in training, it knocks all the wind out of him like a fall he did not quite prepare for because he was laughing, it makes his head spin like dipping his fingers too far into the Force. He doesn’t understand it. He will not understand it for years to come. 

(In truth, he will never quite understand it because those who think they can fully explain love know nothing. He will never quite understand, but he will always trust in it. The same way that he trusts in the Force, he will trust in it, because it surrounds him, and he can feel it. Even when his sight wanes, dims, disappears to leave him in a world of Force sense, he will know it. He will see it. And this memory, long distant, long over, never to be repeated because there is no longer a temple, no longer a garden, and this tree burned--he remembers it burning, remembers the tears in the thick of Baze’s voice when they found it and he howled like something very large wounded, something that would never be healed again--will always be there, will always be in his mind and before his eyes. His Baze, dirty, forgotten, harsh, covered in petals and looking up in awe. So very much a child for a moment. That boy who never learned to be one, who was never given the chance. Who seemed to have crawled out of a hole in Jedha with his fists clenched and blood on his face from the start. That boy not a boy never a boy, smiling.)

All of that is to come. All of that is the future, a future that tugs at his hand, fingers twined around his own, waiting to see if he will close them, if he will hold it or let it fall. 

It is a hinge point. It is a crux. It is a marking.

May the Force of others be with you, it rises unbidden to the front of his mind.

There are many mantras in the temple. There are many lessons. There are the hard ones, the training, putting his body through form after form, getting faster, getting stronger so that even though he is lean, even though he is all arms and legs and skinny, he cannot be caught unless he wills it, can defend himself against anything, against everything. He might not win, but he can fight. His body is like kyber, hard and strong.

Chirrut likes the hard lessons; he likes the training. The Force is just a thing that is there for him. It has always been there, and he feels that it always will be, lurking, questing, bumping into his ankles in the middle of the night because something, something is happening somewhere and it needs to tell him. The Force is a lot like the younger initiates in this way only Chirrut cannot shoo it away when it gets too annoying. He has to listen to it and the way that it prattles. And if he talks a lot sometimes it is only because he is tired of listening always, wants someone else to listen for once, wants the sound of his voice, his own thoughts to be prevalent. 

May the Force of others be with you is buoyant, a bouncing ball on the stone streets, falling but always rising again. It speaks less of the great universal power in everything and more of the way in which that energy manifests itself through others, through everyone, everything that lives. You are not alone in the Force, and the Force is not only in you, it preaches. Learn to see the Force in others, learn to see their beauty and their darkness and the way they fit into the pattern.  
Learn to look beyond yourself.

It is Chirrut’s favorite mantra, the one that spins from his lips when he has done something to displease the masters, when he is in trouble, when he is being, as they say, a child and not serious at all. He says it flippantly, lightly, as though the words are of no consequence at all, as though they are as weightless as his own great heart in his chest which fills and empties inside the cage of his body without him even considering that it happens. His heart is a truth. His heart is a constant. Like the Force.

(Baze Malbus is an undertow someone will warn him in two years when he is fifteen and pining painfully without realizing the truth behind the feeling. He will suck you down, he will drown you in the dark waters of himself without even realizing it. You will never rise again. Chirrut, you’re a bird, and you won’t survive that. You won’t swim to the surface. You’ll just sink with wet feathers, slip beneath the surface and no one will see you again.

There are birds that pluck fish from the water, Chirrut will answer, fifteen and head over heels and unable to listen to sensible suggestions. There are birds that swim. There are birds that rise again. I’m a bird, but I’m the Jedha bird.)

That, too, is part of that future in his hands, on the tips of his fingers, still not quite clenched, still not quite decided. 

The Force of others. 

Baze is still struck by the petals, standing still, eyes closed, flowers all over his face like he could just stay there forever, like he could turn into a tree himself and be happier with his life than he ever has been so far. In this moment, forgotten, peaceful, carved out of something that is not rock, that is not stone, that will not cut his hands to ribbons, that will not hurt like so much else has hurt in the past, like so much else that will hurt in the future. Baze is full size, not curled in on himself, not lurking, not hiding. The Force on him is bright, which he cannot see, cannot feel, cannot know, has never known really except that he is lucky. He is Baze, and he is lucky because no matter what happens, no matter how bad the situation, no matter how hurt, he always gets better. He always gets away before it gets worse. Luck is sometimes the Force in disguise. Luck can be how it bestows itself to those who do not have the eyes or the knowledge to know it for itself.

(I don’t need luck; I have you.)

Everyone’s Force is different. Different on everyone the way that ears are different and smiles. Unique and pleasant and wonderful to look for, wonderful to spot the subtle ways in which they are not the same. Chirrut learned that early on as a child with Force eyes, with Force sense, soft in it, surrounded by it. All he had to do was look or listen or feel. It was just. There. Always. Like his heart, like his feet, like his hands. Taken for granted and underappreciated. 

There are flower petals falling, there is a soft breeze in Jedha, there is the sound of the city rising over the stone walls and the scent of jasmine heavy in the air, and it is serene. There is no drum. There is no avalanche. There is no fire. There is no heavy sea. There is nothing hard or harsh or broken in the moment. Just two boys, one lost in the first real softness he can remember, the other lost in watching him.

Their meeting is inevitable.

His hands clench and now everything is decided. “May the Force of others be with you.” Chirrut knows nothing else to say.

Baze curls inward, shoulders hunching reflexively, defensively, everything in his body tensing as he looks toward the sound. But there are flowers in his hair, stuck to the dirt on his face, trapped in his collarbones, and he does not look menacing. He looks frightened. He looks like everything he has been hiding. 

Their meeting is soft.

**Author's Note:**

> I can be found kicking around [Tumblr](http://sarkastically.tumblr.com/) if you're so inclined.


End file.
